From princes to peasants, musicians to masons, cement plant owners to casual labourers—the State Bank of India (SBI) has been the bank for Indians. Widely trusted and near-ubiquitous, the SBI has come to symbolise banking across the length and breadth of the nation. The Presidency banks of the 1800s—the Bank of Bengal, the Bank of Madras and the Bank of Bombay—set up by the British to facilitate trade and the repatriation of remittances to England were its forebears. The SBI Story narrates the compelling circumstances that prompted the founding of the Presidency banks, how they fared back in the day and why they coalesced to emerge as the Imperial Bank in 1921, which came to be the State Bank of India in 1955.